When they gathered in an office, Sharon explained that her daughter attended college with Wes Johnson, Jr., the nineteen-year-old son of Ohio senator Wes Johnson, Sr., who happened to be the candidate currently polling just ahead of Anthony.
“Small world,” said Katherine, intrigued.
“Well, my daughter is friends with Wes Junior’s girlfriend, and that’s how she heard Wes’s father is close to the end of his string,” Sharon said. “Wes is devastated. The son, not the father. Although I imagine the father must be devastated, too.”
Anthony’s eyes narrowed, already running through the options in his head. “Obviously that’s terrible news,” he said soberly.
“Tragic,” said Katherine.
“But we appreciate you sharing it with us.” Anthony shook Sharon’s hand.
Once Sharon and her supervisor left, Katherine turned to her husband. “I don’t know about you, but I think we have a duty to inform our fellow citizens that if they elect Wes Johnson as president, he may very well die in office.”
“We’ll have to tread carefully here,” Anthony cautioned. “But once this gets out, Wes will surely have to withdraw.”
Katherine wrapped her arms gleefully around her husband’s waist. “You were right, honey,” she said. “God’s on our side.”
Ben
Ben was finally able to concentrate on work again.
Perhaps his friend Damon was right, and the support group had given him the outlet he needed, a way to compartmentalize his life. On Sunday nights, Ben was a short-stringer, but from Monday to Friday, safe inside the glass walls of his office, he was still the rising architect he had always been before the boxes arrived.
On Monday morning, Ben walked past the scale model of the university science center, soon to break ground, and he sat down in his private office with all the trappings of success: the ergonomic chair, the adjustable-height desk, the view from the twenty-seventh floor. Ben had a team of eager young architects working underneath him, hoping to become him in five years’ time. And everything he had done to get to this place—drilling the multiplication tables in the kitchen with his dad, leaving the bar before ten p.m. to finish grad school applications, even the many hours he spent alone with his childhood sketchbook—had all been worth it. If Ben had been asked in an interview where he wanted to be by age thirty, this would have been his answer.
But it was strange for this one piece of Ben’s life to feel so together, triumphant even, while the rest of his life had crumbled. The top of his desk still felt bare, now that the framed photo of him with Claire wasn’t sitting there anymore. Sometimes Ben thought he saw the phantom picture at the edge of his vision: the two of them smiling, naively, on the pier at Coney Island.
Ben leaned under his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper from the inner sleeve of his briefcase, pressing it between his thumbs. It was the letter that he and Maura had discovered at the back of the classroom the night before, with the mysterious reply from “A.”
There was a part of Ben that wondered if he was being punked. Something about returning to a middle school made him particularly suspicious that the letter might just be a cruel prank by one of his fellow group members, like the time a few lacrosse players had removed all of the batteries from Ben and his teammates’ calculators right before the Math League contest. But Ben wasn’t that geeky boy anymore. A cursory glance around his office could remind him of that. And he simply couldn’t believe any members of the support group would ever toy with him like that. Their bond was too special.
So the only explanation, Ben concluded, was that someone else inside the school had found his letter during the week and decided to write a response.
When he phrased it like that, it almost sounded normal.
Which made Ben feel better about his decision to write back.
Dear A,
I’m sorry to disappoint, but I know as little as you do. I’d like to think that your first reading was correct, and that nothing, not even the war, could interfere with the soldier’s love for Gertrude. But after the past few months that I’ve endured （including a bad breakup, a long story）， I’m not sure that I’m the best person to ask about love.
I’d honestly rather think about the war. Do you ever wonder what might have happened if the strings had appeared before WWII? Or any major war? If millions of people across the world—entire generations in some countries—had seen their short strings, would they have known that a war was coming? And would that have been enough to stop it?